Differences In The Razer Mamba Family

When you’re looking for gaming peripherals, you’ll no doubt come across Razer as one of the market leaders. Razer make many different peripherals, including mice, keyboards, headphones, and more. Of these, their mice and keyboard are two of the things that Razer excels at. Today, we’ll be focusing on their mice. In specific, the Razer Mamba family, as it is one of their better known mice family.

The Razer Mamba family has four mice currently, the Elite, the Wireless, the Chroma, and the Mamba Tournament edition. The Elite and Tournament Edition are wired, whereas the Chroma and Wireless are wireless. Due to the fact I only own the Mamba Elite, we will be comparing the other mice to it.

Elite VS Wireless

The biggest difference between the Mamba Elite and the Mamba Wireless, is, well, the wireless-ness. The Mamba Elite has a 2.1m braided cable, whereas the Mamba Wireless has a battery life of up to 50h. Another difference is the lighting on the Wireless vs the Elite. The Elite has extensive lighting as mentioned, but the Wireless only has lights on the scroll wheel and Razer logo. Also different between these mice is the scroll wheel. The Elite can scroll vertically and horizontally, whereas the Wireless can only scroll vertically. The final difference is the weight. To be wireless, the Mamba Wireless needs extra components, upping it’s weight to 106g. The Elite on the other hand is only 96g. As for pricing, the price difference between them is only $10 more for the Wireless.

Elite VS Chroma

Moving on to the Mamba Chroma, it’s mostly the same as the Elite except for two slight differences. The first is that the Razer logo doesn’t light up on the Chroma, whereas it does on the Elite. The other difference is that the Chroma is wireless as mentioned earlier, unlike the wired Elite. In terms of weight, the Chroma is much heavier than the Elite, coming in at 125g, which is much more than the Elite’s 96g. Unlike the small price difference between the Elite and Wireless, the Chroma is much pricier, coming in at $149.99 vs the Elite $89.99 (or on Amazon, $68.99)

Elite VS Tournament Edition

The Mamba Tournament Edition has the least differences between it and the Elite. The only difference is that the Tournament Edition uses a laser sensor, unlike the Elite, which uses an optical sensor. Without going into specifics on how laser sensors work, It’s generally agreed upon that optical sensors are better for gaming. This is due to their accuracy, higher sensitivity options, consistency (no jitters, etc), and more.

My Opinion:

I’ve only used one of the mice, the Mamba Elite, thus I cannot comment on how they feel to use in person rather than their specs on paper. However, I can vouch for the Mamba Elite. The other mouse I’ve used was a Logitech G300S and I have to say that I love the feel on the Mamba Elite much more than the G300S. The Mamba Elite feels more premium to me, and although I have two less buttons on this mouse, I enjoy using it more than the G300S. While the G300S is a good budget option, with a bigger budget, I would opt for the Mamba Elite due to it’s better build quality (and maybe also the RGB). If you want to know more about the G300S or the Mamba Elite, look out for my reviews of those, which are coming soon!

Final Verdict:

In my opinion, if you can afford the 16 extra dollars (Amazon has both editions on sale, although the Elite is still 16 dollars cheaper) I would get the Razer Mamba Wireless. While RGB and horizontal scrolling is cool, I personally think that the convenience of wireless-ness is better than RGB and horizontal scrolling. If I hadn’t gotten the Mamba Elite in a bundle, and was looking for a Mamba mouse, I would most likely go for the Wireless. Although I still love the RGB on the Elite. The sensor on the Tournament Edition out-rules it for me, and wireless RGB isn’t worth the almost double price tag for the Mamba Chroma.